Hello everyone. My husband and I have long decided to reduce our energy consumption at home, but the process has been slow however since the upfront cost is quite high and a return of investment cant be immediately felt.

We had a contractor install a PV a roof-mounted PV system to augment our electricity usage. Then we had our energy usage audited and, not surprisingly, the results say that lighting accounted for the biggest percentage (we are light hogs, lol). You can check here for a DIY style energy auditing http://energy.gov/energysaver/articl...-energy-audits.

So obviously the first thing we had to do was solve our light problem. It was either we remove some or get better and more efficient bulbs. Eventually we decided to swap all our lights to LED bulbs that we got from homedepot (http://goo.gl/NOQlA) and http://www.illustralighting.com.

Next were planning to go over the list of appliances we are currently using based on the audit and try to determine which ones we could love without. Should be an interesting family discussion lol